[The second in a series on sanctioning and its impact on the high school athletes the rules are intended to help. Sanctioning Crisis series index.]

by Ed Grant

And now it has become a farce. How else to describe the latest episode in the
controversy stirred up by the New York high school athletics associations' attempt to decide who can and cannot compete in open track and field meets in which their schools are involved.

It seemed bad enough when Bergen Catholic (NJ) was almost excluded from the Brown Invitational because of a mistake made by the New Jersey association in failing to note their proper membership in that group (only a few days after the school had won a state high school football championship). But it was easily topped by what happened to Winslow Twp in relation to its entry in the Marine Corps Holiday Classic at the New York Armory on Dec. 28.

Following the procedure demanded by the New York association (and the National Federation), meet director Lou Vazquez Jr. had forwarded to the New Jersey association a full list of the schools from that state which had filed entries with the meet.

The problem was that, in filling out their entry, the coaches at Winslow had placed their names on the line indicating "school" while putting "Winslow Twp" down below.

When the New Jersey office received the list, it included not "Winslow Twp HS" but "Russell Bates HS" as the name of the school. There is, of course, no school of that name in New Jersey---Russ has been coach at Winslow (formerly Edgewood) for more than a quarter of a century---so whoever was assigned to OK the list in Robbinsville, duly noted that fact and the school was told that it could not compete. Again, the matter was solved before the meet and Winslow was there.

Among other things, these two episodes show how impossible it is to properly administrate what is, on the face of it, an unconstituional rule to begin with. An innocent mistake by the coaches was magnified into a major one because the people who were handling the request were unfamiliar with the facts. Vazquez could hardly be expected to know the names of every school in NJ; the clerk at Robbinsville could hardly be expected to be familiar with the name of every high school coach in the state.

Another episode that took place during the holiday season affected a different sport. The Diamond State Classic in Delaware had to reject the entry of a New York school which informed the directors of that basketball tournament that it could not compete aginst one of the other three invited teams. So they were told to stay home and a Virginia team was invited instead.

Now the curious fact about this one is that, had the New York school in question (Francis Lewis) scheduled a regular season game with the offending school, there would have been no problem at all since the New York rule is being applied only to competitions of four or more schools.

And this is not just a New York problem. To date, at least nine states have been involved: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina and California. It is painfully obvious that there is some national presence in this and, in fact, the sanctioning process involves contact with the National Federation office in every case.

Another fact that came out recently is the position of the Maryland association which refuses to accept non-public schools in its membership, thereby presenting those schools with a "Catch 22" situation; they cannot compete in New York because they do not belong to an association which will not allow them to join.

A Maryland official told a New York meet official that their position was based on "the separation of church and statem" which, if a valid point, would indict a dozen or more states---including New York itself---which have both public and religious schools in their membership. And this in a state which was founded as a colony almost 400 years ago by Catholics seeking to escape persecution in England.